pages

Friday, September 07, 2007

Nostalgia...

Does a rose give you feelings of nostalgia?

Or a macaron?

Someone commented recently that I'm getting awfully nostalgic lately..I think every single post and picture here is about nostalgia for a past moment. Thismakes me very nostalgic. Fond memories have so much to do with forming our taste choices, both in our mouth/tastebuds and in our heads.Is there a statut of limitations on memories?Or a sell-by-date when they must be removed from the shelf?Can I be nostalgic for what happened a moment ago?I'll always be nostalgic for the luminous light in this little room in Paris...A fragrance like my grandmother's Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass bath salts reminds me of...staying over at her appartment, high over Fairmount park.How can I forget looking out the window and seeing horseback riders below. In my memory, always a couple...always a prince and princess...I don't remember a thing about this moment.I do remember my mother taking us on picnics where she used to go horseback riding as a girl.Can you be nostalgic for someone else's memories?

26 comments:

The Laduree green is so fragile and yet so beautiful.Yes, the colour can create nostalgia I think. For me nostalgia is a feeling quite close to longing. There is something I long for, something which has already happened, may be a childhood memory, something you smell, a tune whistled.

Your post truly sat me in a nostalgia light green mood. (a good thing may be - I am planning a leek soup, with leeks from the garden, for dinner)

And you say you are not a poet. We are but moments. One linked to another. Perhaps it is a desire for grace you are feeling, an appreciation for all fine things where it shows up. The remembrance of those who wear it so well. There is another fine moment waiting for you today. Fall does this to us I think. The change in light, the shift in the breeze. And roses go inward to build toward the spring.

Hi Carol- haven't been in here a while. Crazy summer! I love this rose/macaroon watercolor- is it recent? Gorgeous!Like yourself, I am sucker for nostalgia....today is fully experienced with the passage of time. My husband bought me perfume my mom used to wear....every once in a while I sniff it....for nostalgia's sake. A dash of nostalgia and memories makes life so much richer.....have a great day.

I read in a book once that there are two kinds of people, those who are always looking towards the future and those who are always looking towards the past.I love playing old music and leafing through my old books and drifting off into nostalgic reveries. Especially when one's lived as fascinating a life as you Carol, it must be lovely to reminisce.P.S. I have been loving the comments you make on Flickr - they make me laugh!P.P.S. My little sister is in Paris on her honeymoon - I'm jealous!

oh absolutely you can become enraptured by anothers memories...i love to listen to others rememberances...it is especially blissful to hear tales of youth of my elder family members...although i am quickly become one of them...blessings, rebecca

I wanted to tell you that I looooove Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass and I always have a bottle of it on my dresser. I've worn it for at LEAST 30 years. Also, I really like your blog and am thankful I can get it daily. You do beautiful work and your memories of your parents are lovely.

Thinking further about nostalgia, I picked up a book this morning and read the following:

"As has always been said, clarity comes with the giving up of self. But what this means is that we cease to attribute selfhood to these echoes and mirror images. Otherwise we stand in a hall of mirrors, dancing hesitantly and irresolutely because we are making the images take the lead. We move in circles because we are following what we have already done. We have lost touch with our original identity, which is not the system of images but the great self-moving gesture of this as yet unremembered moment. The gift of remembering and binding time creates the illusion that the past stands to the present as agent to act, mover to moved. Living thus from the past, with echoes taking the lead, we are not truly here, and are always a little late for the feast. Yet could anything be more obvious than that the past follows from the present like the wake of a ship, and that if we are to be alive at all, here is the place to be?

I'm not faulting us for our nostalgia, but instead, hoping to point to a "now living" through this sharing. At present, I need constant reminders because I have lost the childlike wonder of living in the present. I think your wonderful photos and observations of the delightful things you've seen are so beautiful because at those moments when you witnessed them you were totally present to them!

I so enjoy looking at what you have seen! And hearing where you've been!